Hailing

How to spell hailing

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hailing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hailing mean?

1. verbCalling out to someone or signalling to attract their attention, especially to summon a vehicle.
2. verbComing from or originating in a particular place.
3. verbOf the weather, falling as pellets of ice.

Hailing in a sentence

• Hailing a taxi in the pouring rain proved almost impossible.

• Hailing from a small village in Wales, he spoke with a soft accent.

• It was hailing so hard that drivers pulled over under the bridge.

• She stood at the kerb, hailing the approaching bus with a raised hand.

• The new recruits were hailing from every corner of the country.

• The storm went from rain to hailing within minutes, denting car roofs.

Where does hailing come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the present participle of the verb 'hail', a word that carries two separate strands of meaning bound up in one spelling. The greeting and summoning sense descends from the Old Norse 'heill', meaning 'healthy, whole, or sound'; calling 'Hail!' to someone was originally a wish for their good health and prosperity, which is why the same root sits inside the modern word 'hale', as in 'hale and hearty'. From that greeting grew the idea of calling out to attract attention (hailing a cab) and, by the 1800s, of declaring where a person or thing comes from (hailing from a town). The weather sense, frozen rain, has a quite different ancestor: the Old English 'hagol' or 'hægl', a common Germanic word for ice pellets. The shared spelling is purely a coincidence of sound, and the closeness of 'hail' to 'hale' is the trap that catches writers most often.

How the word is built

• hail (to greet, call out, or fall as ice)
• -ing (present participle suffix)